Thursday, March 5, 2009

One day this girl decided to make shortbread cookies with caramelized sugar and browned butter.

CARAMEL BROWN BUTTER SHORTBREAD

120 gr (4.3 oz) sugar

200 gr (7.1 oz) salted butter*

300 gr (10.7 oz) flour

* Or if you only have unsalted butter, add a pinch of salt.

Star by doing a dry caramel: Take a dry pan to the stove and heat it for 1 minute. Add the sugar and it will star caramelizing on the edges, move gently with a spoon until all sugar is melted and with a nice caramel color. At this point add the butter cut into very small chunks. The caramel will bubble so be careful. Keep mixing until all the butter is melted and the mixture starts to get a darker color, don't get carried away or you might burn it. We want brown butter, not burnt butter ;)!

Let it cool slightly and add the flour mixing well, either by hand (carefull if it's still hot) or in a mixer. Take to the fridge until the dough is completely cool. Roll between 2 pieces of cling film or in a floured surface and cut as you like. Bake in a preheated 170ºC (325ºF) oven, until they are golden brown and delicious.

The girl was so happy with her cookies! They had a subtle caramel flavour and were extra crunchy, still beeing buttery. In fact she liked them so much she had to freeze most of the cookies so she wouldn't eat them...

These are the kind of happy-ending stories I wish I had heard growing up before bedtime. The story of the happy caramel shortbread that got eaten even frozen! This looks amazingly delicious! Can't wait to try it.

Prjanik- Sorry if you had problems with the recipe. My dough was also slightly crumbly after beeing in the fridge, but as soon as I pressed it between my hand it came together nicely, still I prefered to roll it between 2 pieces of film to press better without sticking. Maybe the type of flour you used absorbed more liquid and so mayde it more crumbly, or you let the butter cook a bit more causing more evaporation. Those are just my first thoughts...

Good morning!Maybe you're right with the type of the flour. Anyway I've to try this receipt again because yesterday I made an additional mistake and let my "cookies" a bit too long in the oven. Thy taste good (!) but now we need good teeth :)

When you add the butter to the melted sugar, are the two supposed to blend together, or do they still remain as two separate layers? I couldn't get mine to really combine, so I just mixed the two as best as I could.Also, how cool should the mixture be before adding flour? I waited a little bit (the mixture was still pretty hot) before adding the flour, but the sugar had already hardened a little, so it didn't really mix in well.

In spite of all the mistakes I made, it was still delish, so I can't wait to actually make it the right way!

Mine are quite a failure, I couldn't do anything with the dough after taking it out of the fridge, it was too stiff to move! So I'm really really disappointed. My mom put the crumbs in the oven because I would have thrown it out, but I hate when food doesn't look good.